This is part of a series from our recent travel to Europe in June/July 2026.
We arrived at our hotel tired, a little sticky, and carrying the particular fog that comes with overnight travel. Berlin was already awake and already hot.
Europe is in the grip of an intense heat wave right now, and Berlin is no exception. Temperatures were pushing well past 30°C (it is 40C in some parts of Europe including Paris). We had packed for a European summer in the optimistic sense, not the actual one. First order of business: change into something that wouldn’t make us miserable within the first ten minutes. We left our bags at the hotel, pulled on cooler clothes, and headed out into it.
Our first stop was the Brandenburg Gate, and we arrived there at just after 10:30 in the morning..
Even in the heat, with the tourist crowds already gathering, there’s something undeniable about standing in front of it. The Gate has been a witness to so much of modern European history — from Napoleon’s march through it in 1806, to Hitler’s torchlit rallies, to the moment in 1989 when the Wall came down and Berliners flooded through it for the first time in decades. Standing in front of it now, in peacetime, in a reunified city, feels like it deserves a quiet moment of acknowledgment.
We wandered the area, took it in, and then made our way into the Tiergarten , a sprawling park that stretches west from the Gate and is home to more history than most cities contain in their entirety.
A short walk through the park brought us to a memorial that, as two gay men, carried particular weight.
The Memorial to the Homosexuals Persecuted under Nazism is easy to miss if you don’t know to look for it — a single grey concrete cuboid, set slightly off-kilter in a quiet corner of the Tiergarten. It was designed by artists Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset and opened in 2008, deliberately echoing the design of the Holocaust Memorial across the street. The connection is intentional: under the Nazi regime, tens of thousands of gay men were convicted under Paragraph 175 of the German criminal code, which criminalized male homosexuality. Between 5,000 and 15,000 were sent to concentration camps, where they were forced to wear a pink triangle.
What makes the memorial distinctive is a small window set into the concrete, through which you can watch a short looped film of two men kissing — an act that, under the regime this memorial commemorates, could result in imprisonment. Standing there and peering through that window feels quietly, deliberately subversive. It’s a powerful piece of design.
I have never really felt a chill like the one that I had when we were standing there at the memorial. It was the first time, that I have felt like our own country was on the edge of repeating history.
Directly across the street is the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe – the Holocaust Memorial – a vast field of 2,711 concrete stelae of varying heights that you can walk through. The effect is disorienting in the best possible way: the ground undulates beneath you, the columns close in, and the scale of what it represents becomes something you feel rather than just understand.
By about 12:30, the heat had made its case. We headed back to the hotel.
Here’s something we almost never do: we napped.
We are not nap people when we travel. But Berlin in a heat wave on little sleep after a transatlantic flight made a compelling argument, and we listened. A shower, the curtains drawn, and a couple of hours of genuine rest. It was the right call.
Refreshed and slightly more human, we made our way in the afternoon to Checkpoint Charlie.
For anyone who didn’t grow up with the Cold War as a living memory, Checkpoint Charlie was the most famous crossing point between East and West Berlin — the only gateway where Allied military personnel, diplomats, and foreign tourists were permitted to cross into the Soviet sector. Its name comes simply from the NATO phonetic alphabet: after Checkpoint Alpha and Checkpoint Bravo on the outer borders, this was Checkpoint Charlie, third in line and by far the most famous.
What happened here in October 1961 is one of the defining images of the Cold War: American and Soviet tanks, facing each other barrel-to-barrel in the middle of Friedrichstraße, neither side willing to blink. The standoff lasted sixteen hours before both superpowers quietly agreed to back down. The world exhaled.
Today the original guardhouse is long gone — the replica that stands in its place is exactly that, a replica, surrounded by tourist shops and golden arches. It’s been called Berlin’s Disneyland, and that criticism isn’t entirely unfair. But even stripped of its original structures, the weight of what happened on this street corner is hard to ignore. The course of the old Wall is still marked in the pavement with a line of cobblestones. History has a way of holding its ground.
By early evening we’d worked up a proper appetite and found our way to Paulaner Bräuhaus Berlin, a Bavarian beer hall that turned out to be exactly what the day called for. We ordered a round, liked it enough to order another, and had some food to go with it. The kind of meal that doesn’t need to be anything fancy to be exactly right.
By a little after 8 PM, exhaustion had caught up with us properly. We hopped the subway back to the hotel and that was that — lights out, day one done.
Berlin had made a strong first impression.
